Stuck on the M25 for 16 months

Anne Chisholm reviews London Orbital: A Walk Around the M25 by Iain Sinclair

By Anne Chisholm

12:00AM BST 22 Sep 2002

Only Iain Sinclair, a writer obsessed with the history and geography of London, a writer with the curiosity of a journalist, the gift for research of an historian and the imagination of a poet, could have first conceived and then written this rambling, self-indulgent, brilliant book. Like its inspiration, the M25 motorway around London, it covers a lot of ground, goes nowhere in particular and ends where it begins.

However, some focal points emerge. Sinclair begins and ends with the Millennium Dome at Greenwich, which gave him an overwhelming urge to leave town. He had long nursed an unhealthy obsession with another huge, circular, expensive excrescence imposed on London: the M25, opened by Margaret Thatcher in 1986. Sinclair's feelings about Mrs Thatcher - "Argie-bashing, ranting, Cromwell-fierce, hormonally stoked . . ." - are not in doubt.

He is no mean ranter himself: among his pet hates, unsurprisingly, is the car. His decision to explore the M25's hinterland on foot is partly an act of revolt against car culture and what it has done to London and the surrounding landscape.

He set out, in September 1998, "to shadow the motorway in an anticlockwise direction", aiming to complete the circuit before the end of the millennium. He made a sequence of circular walks, using trains and buses to reach his starting and finishing points, accompanied by a friend or two, usually his artist friend Renchi Bicknell, whose mysterious (and lamentably badly reproduced) drawings illustrate the book, along with a batch of dull photographs. A map would have been more useful.

Sinclair lives in Hackney, so he begins and ends his circumnavigation of M25 territory at Waltham Abbey, a straight ride north of his home, where Harold, the last Saxon king, is buried - a fit patron saint for Sinclair's exploration of "the fiction that is England". From there, he wanders across outer suburbia, through woods, parks, industrial wastelands and shopping centres, ancient villages, country estates-turned-mental hospitals.

He walked through Enfield Chase to Shenley, from Abbots Langley to Staines, across to Epsom, then north-east again via Shoreham to Dartford, across the river and back for a millennium-eve feast in an obscure Indian restaurant and a midnight service in Waltham Abbey. Typically, Sinclair describes the final dinner in the first chapter.

The book is partly a diary, full of staccato, verbless sentences like a journalist's notebook, and partly a ferociously learned, literate and curious exploration of the plight of the nation. Sinclair notices everything: suburban women "still steaming from tanning-beds", a pub sign in an urban wasteland offering "Continuous Sky". He is obsessed by verbal associations and layers of meaning - literary, geographical and historical; he relishes a place like Theobalds Park in Hertfordshire, once a 16th-century royal retreat, then a Victorian brewer's country estate and now the Abbey National Centre of Excellence.

He loves large greasy British breakfasts, old buildings and unspoiled countryside, and hates the heritage movement, the military, medical and industrial establishment, and developers. He admires artists, rebels, visionaries, poets, and outsiders; he mistrusts officialdom and politicians. He simply loathes Bluewater, the shopping centre near Dartford with parking space for 13,000 cars. New Labour, the perpetrators of the Dome, get off lightly, being dismissed as incompetent crooks and "masters of double talk".

From time to time the reader tires of Sinclair's relentless energy and dense prose; there are moments of exhilaration and beauty along the way, but also moments when you think the book, like the road, will never end. Nevertheless, you are glad to have made the journey.